[Zionist Conspirator]

This is most unusual. The vast majority of Pentecostals (outside the liberal mainline churches) are Biblical Fundamentalists and supernaturalists (I never have understood Pentecostalism's appeal to liberal intellectuals). As a matter of fact, it actually started down here in the Bible Belt amongst the poorest of people--the kinds of people most Catholic spokesmen go out of their way to exclude from the "rainbow" of human religions.

I actually believe Catholics could learn from Pentecostals to tone down the intellectualism, rationalism, anti-supernaturalism, Biblical criticism, and evolutionism and allow the emergence of an sector of American Catholics who are more like the illiterate peasants of other Catholic cultures, but what do I know? In America Catholicism is all about intellect, intellect, intellect, and evidently the intellect tells us that the universe created itself and that the Bible is made up of myths adopted from pagan cultures.

Now when hyper-intellectual bishops with Ph.D.'s actually come to illegal Appalachian churches to watch "poor white trash" handle rattlesnakes we'll be getting somewhere!

[tiki]

but what do I know?

LOL, obviously not a lot. It used to be the argument that Catholcis were mostly illiterate poor people who just did what the Church told them to do, now we're too intellectual, with no active belief in the supernatural.

I will grant that the Catholic Church IS intellectual, it holds all the truth left to us by Jesus and sustained by the Holy Spirit. It holds 2000 years of Christianity. Our faith is filled with the supernatural, Jesus is available to us, body and blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist and all we have to do to avail ourselves of His Presence is to meet Him at the altar. We pray for miracles and we receive them and we recognize them. Some know a lot of doctrine and theology and some don't, some take our religion for granted but most don't.

I don't know what to say, as a former, church-going Methodist who also attended Pentecostal and Baptist services from time to time, I have never found anything so beautiful as to worship God in the Catholic Mass. I have never seen so much faith in all my religious life. I have never seen so many people who take the words, "Thy will be done" more seriously. They believe through the wonders and the miracles and through the hardships of this life. They understand that emotions come into play but aren't the pinnacle of their faith. As I tell my Catechism kids, it's as easy and simple as "Jesus loves you" and as hard as all the world and beyond.